Dr. Anthony Fauci finally reverses course, agrees keeping schools closed during COVID was ‘mistake’
Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top adviser to two presidential administrations during the COVID-19 pandemic, reversed course in a Tuesday interview and agreed that shutting down schools for more than a year due to the virus was a “mistake” — while also arguing the initial decision to close classrooms was correct.
“Keeping it for a year was not a good idea,” the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) told “CBS Mornings” co-host Tony Dokoupil while talking about his new memoir “On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service.”
“So, that was a mistake in retrospect?” Dokoupil asked. “We will not repeat it?”
“Absolutely, yeah,” Fauci responded.
Fauci, 83, has previously stood by the recommendation that forced children out of classrooms and into remote learning alternatives — both in sworn congressional testimony and remarks to the press.
During summer 2020, as many schools were considering reopening, Fauci butted heads with former President Donald Trump — touting Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines that forced closures based on spread in the broader community.
“I disagree with @CDCgov on their very tough & expensive guidelines for opening schools. While they want them open, they are asking schools to do very impractical things. I will be meeting with them!!!” Trump posted on Twitter July 8, 2020.
“There may be some areas where the level of virus is so high that it would not be prudent to bring children back to school,” Fauci said that August, warning at another point of an “insidious increase” in cases as schoolchildren prepared for the year.
Asked by “PBS NewsHour” host Judy Woodruff that same month whether “many months of virtual learning” would be the norm, Fauci answered, “In some places, Judy, that may be the case.”
In many interviews, the NIAID director would caveat that the “default position” should be to reopen classrooms while stressing the importance of ensuring first that transmission rates were low.
When some schools did allow students and teachers back in September 2020, fewer than 1% showed cases of COVID-19, according to Brown University’s National COVID-19 School Response Data Dashboard.
In January 2021, a CDC study showed “little evidence that schools have contributed meaningfully to increased community transmission’’ — but following a pressure campaign from powerful teachers’ unions against the Biden administration, classrooms would mostly remain closed until the following school year.
“I don’t want to use the word ‘mistake,’” Fauci told ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl in an October 2022 interview when asked about school closures after announcing his retirement as both White House chief medical adviser and NIAID director.
“If I do, it gets taken out of the context that you’re asking me the question on,” Fauci said. “We should realize — and have realized — that there will be deleterious collateral consequences when you do something like that.”
He also claimed that he had repeatedly said officials should do “everything we can to keep the schools open” — and griped about being scapegoated as the architect of closures.
“I had nothing to do [with it]. I mean, let’s get down to the facts,” Fauci told Karl.
In testimony this year before the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Fauci revealed that the six-feet social distancing guidelines had no scientific backing — and was “not convinced” they led to learning loss.
“It sort of just appeared. I don’t recall,” he told the panel in a January interview of the mandate that scrapped most in-person learning options. “Just an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data or even data that could be accomplished.”
The US Department of Education released statistics in September 2022 showing reading scores among nine-year-olds had plummeted over the course of the pandemic to their lowest point in 30 years, while math scores fell for the first time ever in a half-century of tracking.
“The ‘science’ promoted by teachers unions and public health officials never justified prolonged school closures,” a spokesperson for the House COVID subcommittee majority told The Post.
“Safely returning our children to school as soon as possible should have been the top priority. In the face of a future pandemic, our public health officials must recognize this COVID-era failure and never again repeat it.”
Elsewhere in Tuesday’s “CBS Mornings” interview, Fauci said the real issue with closures was that schools weren’t shut down “immediately” and “completely,” while at times clinging to “major social distancing” as “the right thing.”
“I kept on saying, ‘Close the bars, open the schools, open the schools as quickly and as safely as you possibly can,'” he recalled. “But, initially, to close it down, was correct.”
“One clear area seems to be the school closures, which did enormous harm to kids on multiple levels,” Dokoupil pointed out, “and didn’t seem to save lives. And I wonder, can we say today that that is a mistake?”
“No,” Fauci replied when asked about the harms of remote learning.
